Taken in northwest GA. Look at this adorable thing. It looks just like lichen! If this is the right species, that means it comes in 4 other flavors too, and I got the best one! Hundreds of thousands of generations of caterpillars lived and died over the many many years, just to make this extra poisonous cutie.
The end game is to become perfectly adapted to their environment, at which point changes may slow way down, like with sharks or cockroaches. If new niches open up (like a local species going extinct), existing species will fill the gap and adapt to it, becoming new species over time, eventually competing with everyone else like usual.
I guess the ultimate ultimate goal is to expand across the galaxy and eventually escape the death of the universe, but in the short term, its being well adapted to the local environment.